"Genshin Impact" Review - A live service done right

Available for: iOS, Android, Playstation 4, Microsoft Windows

Reviewed for: Playstation 4

Like many other folks, the first time I ever heard of Genshin Impact was when Sony played a trailer during one of their pre-PS5 events. At the time, everybody had the exact same thing to say/alternative title: "Breath of the Waifu." Indeed, the obvious Breath of the Wild graphical influence and gaggle of buxom female anime companions made such a colloquial title inevitable! Then, in September, Genshin Impact released completely free of (upfront) charge and took the gaming world by storm. It seemed like everywhere you looked there'd be Genshin Impact content, and impressions of the game seemed decidedly positive across the board. For many (myself included), Genshin Impact served as an ideal case. In a world where companies like EA, Ubisoft, and Activision Blizzard charge the usual $60 in upfront costs for their unfinished, content-poor games, and then have the gall to stuff their products full of additional predatory monetization to try and get even more money out of you, something like this is a breath of fresh air. Developers MiHoYo did the unthinkable and made a complete, compelling, and content-rich experience with more effort and thought put in than anything those aforementioned companies have put out in a while. Then, knowing that they wanted to make up their money through loot boxes, they elected to put out this complete, compelling, content-rich experience at no upfront cost. Obviously having loot boxes in games isn't a good thing, period. But folks have long said that if a free-to-play game is good, then in-game monetization can be justified, and some have even said that in such cases they might feel tempted to shell out a little bit of money to support the game, given the lack of entry fee. If ever there were proof that the free-to-play model can work when attached to a good game, Genshin Impact, which recouped its development costs over just its first two weeks, could certainly be it. In the interest of transparency, dear reader, I haven't yet beaten Genshin Impact. It's a long game made longer by certain design choices, I have other things that I need to get through, and I don't think the overall experience is going to change much from where I currently am. So though this is billed as a review, take it more as my impressions after a couple of weeks spent with this title. Let's get into it!

Genshin Impact takes place in the magical world of Teyvat: a Breath of the Wild-inspired fantasy land made up of nations ruled by the gods of the magical elements, which are: animo (wind), geo (earth), hydro (water), cryo (ice), pyro (fire), electro (guess), and dendro (I think dark).You play as "the traveler," a male or female member of a set of twins from another world. Upon entering Teyvat, your twin of the opposite gender is captured by an unknown goddess, and you're sent hurtling towards Teyvat with no idea of where you are, where you really came from, or where your sibling is. Upon rescuing a magical floating loli from a river, you set out on an adventure across the land to find out who attacked you, rescue your sibling, and make a bunch of friends along the way. What follows is a serviceable anime story, but you likely won't be expecting anything else...I sure wasn't. The story here was clearly not where the brunt of the effort went, but even though a lot of the turns it takes have been taken before (Avatar: The Last Airbender is the first thing that comes to mind for one of them), it does at least try and go interesting places. So that's kinda all there is to say about that. I could go into characters, and I could go into the world itself, but both of those are better suited to other sections, so I might as well just end the story segment here for now. We'll be back after we finish discussing gameplay. 

A slightly misleading way to describe the gameplay would be to say: "Imagine Breath of the Wild without the weapon durability." You do fight against bokoblin-esque or chuchu-esque enemies with a multitude of weapon types in arenas that can very easily catch on fire, and Genshin Impact does indeed lack the weapon durability system that its inspiration had, but that's only a high-level overview of how gameplay works. Genshin Impact has a roster of I believe 30 or so playable characters, and of those characters, you carry a party of 4 at a time. Each character has a certain type of weapon that they use, a certain type of element that their special attacks revolve around, and skills unique to them. Moment-to-moment gameplay consists of switching between the members of your party as the situation demands to handle certain enemies (if you see enemies on top of a scaffolding, for instance, you might switch to an archer or mage) and trigger elemental reactions. Elemental reactions are really the key point of Genshin Impact's combat system. Every element, when it comes into contact with another element, has some kind of reaction, and triggering as many reactions as possible is the key to ending fights quickly and decisively. In some instances it's as easy as coming up against a fire enemy and just going through the non-fire elements in your party one at a time triggering each possible reaction. Other times you'll have to prime a reaction with one party member, then detonate it with another (making an opponent wet with a water attack then following up with another character's electric attack). Other times the environment will do the priming work for you by, say, having an enemy step in water and becoming wet as a result, so all that will remain will be to switch to, say, an electric user to capitalize on this. This whole world and all its systems are built around the concept of elements, so while you'll need to use weapons in fights, the most important thing is to remember how elements react to one another. I want to come back to what I mentioned earlier about the roster of characters for a second. We'll be getting into the nitty-gritty of how one goes about acquiring these many characters in a later section, but for now I'd like to reiterate what I've already said: every character has a set of unique skills that only they have. Spreading 7 or so elements and maybe 5 weapon types among over 30 characters doesn't leave a lot of room for loadout variety, so MiHoYo compensated for this by making it so that each character has at least one thing you can only go to them for. For instance, one of the character I regularly use in my party is Barbara, a water mage. She isn't the only water-using character I have, but I bring her along because even though none of her skills are particularly useful for fighting, both of her major skills have healing effects, and I haven't come across any other healers yet. You could look at a game like this and determine pretty quickly that you'd end up making your party decisions based on weapon and element loadouts, but I think it's an interesting extra layer of strategy to have to think about specific skills as well. 

Now we return to story, and we come to how it and gameplay end up overlapping: the "adventure level." One of the little meters that you'll occasionally see pop up is the "adventure level," which fills up gradually as you do things like: open chests, clear dungeons, complete side quests, and fulfill daily commissions (daily missions that are randomly generated). After certain story beats, you'll be required to get to a certain adventure level to unlock the next bit of story, and this can sometimes mean grinding up to 5-10 adventure levels. What this means in practice is that you'll face days upon days of open world grinding inbetween certain story missions, and when I use the word "days," that isn't an exaggeration. A lot of the time, the best way of gaining adventure level progress is through those aforementioned daily commissions, so while you can certainly do a whole bunch of other things inbetween days, the vast majority of the progress you make will be limited to four missions in a 24-hour period. This is why I said that this is a long game made longer by design decisions in the introduction. Though this unbelievable amount of grinding is part of why I don't think I'll be dedicating a huge amount of time to Genshin Impact over other things from here on out, it's a bit of a double-edged sword. You only get 4 daily commissions per day, so when you're in a grind period, you can easily just log in once a day, do those commissions to get a bit of adventure level experience, then go do something else. So, there's something to be said for that even if it's an incredibly poor design choice. But here's the thing about it that puzzles me: adventure level experience doesn't seem to be one of the monetized aspects of this game unless that particular monetization is deeply buried. In a world where Ubisoft sells "timesavers" in their games that reduce the time required for between-level grinding, selling packs of adventure level experience in a free game seems like it would be one of the first things the devs would have thought of. I'm not complaining, don't get me wrong, but given the amount of monetization that is in the game, I have to either completely commend or genuinely scratch my head at the devs. 

So with that out of the way, what exactly is monetized here? Well, just about everything else. The biggest monetization vector going for Genshin Impact is its cast of characters. You get a handful of characters as part of the story, and in order to get other ones, you typically need to use the "wish" (loot box) system. Sometimes the devs will elect just to give you a new character for seemingly no reason (I got that aforementioned character, Barbara, in a message from the devs without having to spend any money, for instance), but 9 times out of 10 you'll need to engage in the wish system. Like any loot box economy, you spend in-game currency that is accumulated as you play but can be purchased for real-world money as well. You can buy wishes either in sets of 1 or 10, with 10 being the recommended path (hmm, I wonder why). In each batch of wishes you purchase, you'll get a whole bunch of equipment (which you'll likely just use to improve things you already have) and occasionally a new character. Which character you get is, of course, totally random (except in specific wish packs that are geared towards a certain character), and thankfully, unlike in other loot box economies, if you end up getting a character you already have, you instead get an item that improves the version of the character you already had, so there's no need to worry about getting duplicate characters. Now, there are reports of people spending thousands of dollars trying to get all the characters, and in case you aren't a sane human being who sees that and thinks "what the HELL?" PLEASE for the love of everything good in this world, don't spend thousands of dollars on these loot boxes. Despite what I've already said about each character behaving a little differently, I can promise that you aren't going to need every character. Hell, you probably aren't really going to need any characters other than the ones the game just gives you (though that may very well change later on in the game than I'm at currently, so take that with a grain of salt). That isn't to say "don't do the wishes at all," mind you. You get enough of that currency as you play the game to get quite a few spins on the wish system without spending a cent, which can make it a good bit of fun if you aren't the kind of person who is in danger of getting hooked by that. The point I want to arrive at here is that I personally have gotten somewhere between 6 and 10 characters from the wish system without spending money, and of those new characters, I've only incorporated one into my party, and the only reason I did was because she was a powerful, tall, thicc, electricity and greatsword-wielding pirate lady and I wanted to have her on the team because reasons. So yeah, by all means use the currency you acquire to occasionally see what new characters you can get. You might end up with someone you want on your team, and even if you don't, it's still fun to see what other characters these devs thought up. But as I said in the introduction and this paragraph respectively, these guys recouped their development costs after two weeks and there are reports of people spending thousands of dollars in-game with nothing but regret to show for it. You don't need new characters badly enough to throw away actual money over them, and the nice Chinese folks who made the game don't need your help to keep the lights on. So please, just use what you get in-game. 

Beyond the characters you can get from the wish system, there is also another incentive to utilize the system (without spending money). When you get these loot boxes, they'll typically also come with another form of in-game currency (the fact that there's more than one kind is a bit devious, but that's a conversation for another day), and these bits of currency can be used in a marketplace that isn't based on chance. See, just about everything in Genshin Impact can be leveled up: characters, weapons, skills, etc. Each one of these things has an initial level cap, and once you reach that level cap, you need to "ascend" the thing in question using various combinations of items that are displayed once you reach the cap. Once you ascend the thing in question, the level cap is raised and you can continue leveling up until you reach the new cap, then you rinse and repeat. All of the items that are used for character/weapon/skill/etc ascension can be found in-game. Sometimes they're dropped by certain enemies, sometimes you find them in the open world, sometimes they're only available in certain dungeons on certain (actual, not in-game) days of the week, but all of them can be acquired in-game. That not chance-based marketplace I alluded to earlier, however, sells many of these items with what exactly is sold seeming to change every month. So if you buy wishes and get that other currency, you might notice that the last item you need to ascend your favorite sword is only available in dungeon x on Sundays, and Sunday was yesterday. In such a case, you might look at that marketplace, see that the item in question is available for 30 of that currency, notice that you have like 500 of the currency from 2 or 3 wish sessions (this marketplace has cheap prices), and think "might as well." In this way, the game sort of rewards you spending your in-game currency on loot boxes with in-game currency to get important items that you might otherwise have to wait for. So to summarize on the in-game monetization in Genshin Impact, there's a lot of it, and if this weren't a complete and free-to-play experience, that would be unforgivable. All the usual warnings about not playing this if you're the type to struggle with the lure of gambling apply here, make no mistake, but speaking as someone without any unfortunate mental hangups like that, I've thus far not had to/felt inclined to spend real-world money. I will say this, though, there are some who have gotten much farther than I have that say the game finds a way to make either the level up or weapon level grind bad enough to warrant spending cash later on. Obviously I haven't reached such a point and can neither confirm nor deny, but because of those kinds of frankly unsurprising reports (and sort of as a way of putting a grain of salt into the score that comes from my current impressions), I will be taking off a full point at the end of this simply because it's a possibility. That's not typically how I do things, but I think it's something I ought to do if I'm not going to actually reach that point myself before putting this review out. 

That brings us to the technical side of things, and if I could offer one bit of advice to potential new Genshin Impact players, it would be this: Do NOT play this on PS4. Good heavens, I don't know if the bug list is as extensive on other platforms, but from what I've seen, the PS4 version is by far the worst. Most noticeably, the framerate in city areas is absolutely abysmal. Walk into the early-game city of Mondstadt, for example, and every couple steps you'll be able to count the frames per second on one hand. This isn't a problem I've seen in gameplay footage on other platforms, so it's obvious that the devs spent most of their optimization budget on platforms such as mobile devices (where, coincidentally, they're bound to earn most of their microtransaction money). Beyond that, you name a bug, and chances are good Genshin Impact has it. Texture pop-in? Character pop-in? Asset pop-in? Small bits of lag in the action where the screen freezes for a second before continuing? Subtitles not remotely matching what the character is saying? Characters repeating a line of dialogue instead of moving to the next one? Subtitles being entire lines ahead or behind? Being forced out of aiming mode if you try to start aiming a bow while running away from an enemy? The gang's all here and I'm sure I'm missing a couple other technical issues! Pair this with a control scheme (at least by PS4 standards) where attacking is mapped to the circle button and dodging is mapped to R1, and you've got yourself a really odd technical package. The only thing I can say I didn't see was hard or soft crashes, but even that is trivialized by the simple fact that the game is always online...meaning if you have piece of s**t Spectrum internet like I do and it blips out for a second, you practically do have the game crash, it just isn't because of faulty programming.

But in spite of all of that ugliness, there are some technical areas in which Genshin Impact (I'd argue) objectively is better than the Zelda game that inspired it. The first area is the soundtrack. This isn't a particularly high bar to clear given that Breath of the Wild didn't have a soundtrack other than musicians randomly playing notes for combat ambiance, but even so, Genshin Impact's ost is breathtaking. Every area in the game (towns, cities, landmarks, stretches of wilderness, all of them) has its own set of themes with multiple variations of them to match the time of day (and sometimes weather conditions, if memory serves) in which you arrive. None of these themes are particularly long or excessively complex, but they always help set the scene and are almost always original enough (with the exception of the Dawn Winery theme, which is just "Greensleeves") to be noteworthy. In the soundtrack's best moments, it helps solidify the other technical achievement Genshin Impact can boast about: its world. Early on in the game, a need to grind up my adventure level lead me to the region called "Liyue," the part of the world inspired by China. My goal there was to activate fast travel markers to get that adventure level experience and potentially save some time further on in the story, so gameplay in this stretch of time was mostly exploring. During this time, I entered a mountain range straight out of an old Chinese painting...you know the kind, right? The absolutely massively tall mountains that are super thin and have like 1-3 trees on them? I was gliding from peak to peak over the clouds for most of the in-game day, and eventually the time of day changed to a point that changed the theme to a version played first on the piano, then echoed by that incredibly beautiful traditional asian instrument that a quick google search reveals is called an "Erhu." I had already had to stop multiple times over the course of my exploration of this mountain range to just take in the view and romantically sigh, but at this point the beauty of it all was almost unbearable. Can you name even one part in Breath of the Wild that inspires that kind of reaction? The art style of this game is, in fact, a direct ripoff of that aforementioned Zelda title, but in my time with Genshin Impact, I saw it utilized in much more effective ways. 

Folks, I doubt you hadn't heard of Genshin Impact before clicking on this review today, and if that's the case, I doubt you haven't already picked it up if you were going to. With that in mind, what else is left to say? If you haven't downloaded this game yet and the negatives I've posed don't seem like they'll affect you that much (or if you'll be playing on a platform other than PS4 and therefore won't have as many technical problems), it literally doesn't cost you anything to give it a try. Genshin Impact is far from a perfect game, but as far as free-to-play titles that you can boot up for a couple minutes a day go, it's definitely one of the best. 

Let us review:

Horrific adventure level grinding - 1.0

Technical issues - 1.0

Possibility for coercive design later on - 1.0

The final score for Genshin Impact is...

7.0/10 - Good

Not bad, MiHoYo, not bad